Clinton in Exile by Carol Felsenthal

Author:Carol Felsenthal [Felsenthal, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General
ISBN: 9780061860485
Google: -tgJmSnMc-wC
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 1976-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

LATER THAT MONTH, Bill Clinton’s new blogger friends took some credit for his enraged response—“pushback,” they called it—to Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace. When Wallace suggested that Clinton was distracted and did not do enough to fight terrorism during his presidency, making him partly responsible for 9/11, the raw anger, the refusal to back down, the avalanche of words, made him sound, they said, just like a blogger.

“When we announced that you were going to be on Fox News Sunday,” Wallace said, “I got a lot of e-mail from viewers. And I’ve got to say, I was surprised. Most of them wanted me to ask you this question: Why didn’t you do more to put Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda out of business when you were president? There’s a new book out I suspect you’ve already read, called The Looming Towers. And it talks about how the fact that when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, Bin Laden said, ‘I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of U.S. troops.’ Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the Cole…. And after the attack, the book says that Bin Laden separated his leaders, spread them around, because he expected an attack, and then there was no response. I understand that hindsight is 20/20.”

That’s when Clinton exploded: “So you did Fox’s bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me…. At least I tried. That’s the difference between me and…all of the right wingers who are attacking me now. They ridicule me for trying. They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried. So I tried and failed.” He also got personal, telling the mild-mannered and surprised Wallace, “And you’ve got that little smirk on your face and you think you’re so clever.”24

“My reaction,” says one of the bloggers, “is this guy has clearly been reading blogs…. I have a feeling that his reading the blogs got him to the point where he said, ‘That’s enough.’” This blogger says that the fact that Wallace works for Fox News would send any lefty blogger into the sort of red-faced, finger-wagging tirade that viewers saw.25

Some people who are close Clinton observers say he went loaded for bear to the Wallace interview, that he had rehearsed his rant. “It was clear that he had been waiting for that question for a long time,” says Leon Panetta.26

Others say that he was genuinely offended by the question, that he had been promised that the interview, taped just as the CGI conference was concluding, would focus on the highly successful—$7.5 billion was raised—meeting, and that he felt sandbagged by Wallace’s question, which, says Sandy Berger, was not even a question but “a speech, basically, saying, ‘Why did you fail?’…He just decided that he was not going to sit back and take that.”27

Clinton had grown unaccustomed to harsh treatment from mainstream broadcast and even cable hosts. For the last couple

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.